Film – Page 2 – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

Daydream trippers.

REVERSIBLE REALITY is an all too plausible glimpse of the future but offers no surprises – however, it is as timely as hell

The teaser for this `fantasy thriller` enjoins us to picture a world where you can -among other things -`settle scores with a hated boss…all without consequences`. Indeed, in the dark but comic opening scene an overwrought employee does just that. The street below his office gets littered with the corpses of his repeatedly vanquished boss in his virtual fantasy.

Dmitry Konstantinov, the 57 year old director-cum-screen writer responsible for Reversible Reality (Obratimaya Realnost) has a history of involvement in crime thrillers. For all its being set a few decades hence and tickling us with some wacky science, this is another one.

This 84 minute film got a 12+ certificate release this year, two years after its completion. It incorporates noir elements alongside a boardroom thriller within a science fiction framework. Some bankable actors have added the icing on the cake by adding their names to it. Heartthrob Pavel Chinarev provides the lead and the multi-award winning Timofey Tribuntsev (The Island, 2006) makes a great theatrical bad guy. Meanwhile the alt-pop outfit Mojento lay on some musical interludes.

Virtual addiction.

The film is a glimpse of a hyperurbanised Russia of tomorrow. Here Virtual Reality know-how has advanced to the degree where pundits can immerse themselves in interactive parallel realities.

A Virtual Reality corporation called New Life has found itself riding on the crest of a wave of demand for its services. Citizens are content to vegetate in their free time, with what are called `Adventures`, tightrope walking across a gorge, scoring a goal for a major football team and so on instead of hiking and dating.

Blissed out commuters enjoying their Adventure.[En.Kinorium.com]

However, glitches are starting to appear and these sweet dreams are starting to become more like nightmares as a cell opposed to virtual living have found a way to hack into the system. Is the grand scheme of New Life in jeopardy?

Cybercop.

Enter Mihail (Chinarev). A specialist in online crimes, he gets tasked with infiltrating New Life as an employee and to seek and destroy the `antivirts`. Suspicion has fallen on one Vika, an employee of the company who commits such flagrant breaches of propriety as reading hard copy books on the metro (Zamyatin’s We, no less!)

Mikhail though is soon mesmerized by Vika’s gamine charms. With her as his new squaw he begins to uncover New Life corporation’s dastardly plot to extend its powers. (They are even confiscating people’s household pets the better to minimize any competition with their Adventures!) In the process the boss of the corporation is clubbed to death – or so it seems – and the fingers all point to Mikhail.

This multilayered whodunnit is rolled out with a fast pace and much talk. The septic New World was one that I haver seen countless times before – not least inBladerunner with its nocturnal cityscapes overseen by vast video displays. The technological marvels of it are kept to a wise minimum – although the downloading of Mikhail’s mind into the body of the boss – will play a part in what transpires.

Fifty costumes were designed for this show. Their sleek quality adds to the general texture of the film as do the transparent computer screens. The virtual reality appliances are represented by a bar of light hovering before the punter’s eyes.

The actors seem to be doing their own thing, but in a good way. Chinarev is a fisticuff trader whose bedroom features models of motorbikes. Tribuntsev acts his socks off as the despotic CEO (as well as others who come to inhabit his body). Vera Kolesnikova (100 Days of Freedom, 2018) is doll faced and impassive and it is easy to see how Mikhail could become spellbound by her. We also get a cheering cameo from Vladimir Yumatov who plays a seedy antediluvian sleuth given to announcing his presence with a loud blowing of his nose.

Old World Futureworld.

Overall this conformist and automated anti-utopia took me back to Hollywood films from two decades back such as Equilibrium and Minority Report (both from 2002). I found this to be a bedrock of reassurance. The theme explored here is a very old one (one could go back to Huxley’s `feelies` in Brave New World from a century ago) and one far from reassuring, but the film engages with it in a style and format I could relate to with ease.

About time.

The appearance of Reversible Reality in the cinemas seemed like an answer to a call. The news is full of stuff about how Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality scheme – Meta – is faltering owing to over-investment and people are losing their jobs because of it. Perhaps you and I are not so willing to trade in our old real lives for new virtual ones. Perhaps, like Mikhail and Vika at the close of the movie, we would rather be sitting on an actual boat floating down an actual river on an actual summer’s evening. In an interview for Kinoteatr.ru Chinarev commented:

` After all, we look into the monitor screens more than we do each other’s eyes`

Postscript. I have received news that the release of Hamlet Dulyan’s long awaited adaptation of Evgeny Zamyatin’s influential dystopia WE has yet again been cancelled. (It was supposed to reach cinemas on December 1st of this year following many delays). No reason has been forthcoming. This echoes the cancellattion of the release of the film EMPIRE V (From the Viktor Pelevin novel) last March.This represents a disturbing new trend in Post February 2022 Russian cultural life.

The lead image is from Mobilelegends.net

SPACE CORN: STAR MIND reviewed.

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

STAR MIND (Syesdni Razoom) had been in the offing for half a decade before it made it into the Russian cinemas on January 6^th this year, doing so amidst precious little in the way of public poster campaigns or journalistic coverage (which may account for my seeing it in an almost empty cinema hall).

STAR MIND constitutes a 98-minute-long `adventure fantasy` certified at 12^+.Whilst its trailers seem to promise a horror, it would be more accurate to view it as pure (`hard`) science fiction laced with some thriller and action elements.

R.D Studios, who focus on the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres and who brought us Abigail (2019) are behind it.

The 38-year-old man with the megaphone Vyacheslav Lisnevsky, who worked on the fantasy drama Eclipse from 2017 here directs a young cast of relative unknowns.

The main protagonist, Doctor Steve Ross, is played by Egor Koreshkov. Russian television viewers will know him for his role in the series Eighties this year and he stars in the much-anticipated future world drama We due out this year. Alena Konstantinova supplies the love interest. Other players include Dmitry Frid, Alexander Kuznetsov (who sadly died before this film was released) and – it is interesting to see – a `woman of colour` in the form of Liza Martinez.

The picture, shot in the more futuristic areas of Moscow and in Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan, represents something of a test case. We already know that Russia has the capability to roll out some credible science-fiction blockbusters because of the precedents of Inhabited Island (1 and 2) and Invasion (2020). STAR MIND however, consists of an off-world space adventure requiring even more lavish visual effects. Can Russian cinema meet this challenge?

Interrupted Quest.

The film opens a decade or so hence with the Earth in the grip of an ecological virus which takes a malign toll on the biosphere leading to plants and animals perishing and our planet becoming ever more uninhabitable.

In the midst of this, however, strange artefacts get discovered in caves around the world. These take the form of orbs and hail from we know not where. Doctor Ross is the man who learns how to activate them. It appears that they function as `seeders` and are able to make planets with oxygen and water even more able to cradle new life.

It is he who sets up Project Gemini. The mission of this is to seek out Earth’s twin planets and then terraform them using these orbs, thus finding a new habitat for humanity.

Egor Koreshkov as Doctor Steven Ross [Kinofilmpro.ru]

A team of men – and one Afro-Caribbean woman -and he take a shuttle through an intergalactic wormhole set for just such a planet.

Meanwhile, via flashbacks, we learn that the good doctor has a complicated relationship with a woman back on Earth who is pregnant by him (a romantic subplot which will go on to gain significance).

The ship carries them off course and they arrive at a planet they had not planned to – which nevertheless seems to have the right credentials for terraforming. All the while, a slimy critter has been a stowaway with them, hiding in the orb that they had taken on-board with them (Because – because…whatever). This tentacled monster is now at loose in the ship, picking off the crew, and with its own plans for the new planetary home….

We can see that this storyline is not the product of a lengthy brainstorming lunch. In fact, it is a stitching together of Interstellar (2014) and the Alien franchise (from 1979). The scriptwriters have made some attempts to put their own stamp on things. The life-spreading orbs are a fresh creation and there is a twist concerning the monster: it is a robot.

Dejavu.

The iconography of STAR MIND seems all rather familiar. We have ship with chunky steel doorways and crepuscular interiors with plenty of brightly lit consoles, and a cast of uniformed young men -and one black woman (who is given to running about in her underwear – Ripley style). The new planet too is all craggy and rocky in its terrain.

The technology on show seems like an odd clash of the current and the fantastical. The crew’s spaceship is a shuttle much like the ones employed by NASA in the present day and it is blasted off in a rocket also like the ones we know and are used to. Later, however the ship enters an` interdimensional wormhole` type thing of a much more extravagant nature.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the fact that all the characters are known by Western names. All the signs and computer readouts are in English too. Even the inclusion of a black woman can be taken as an attempt to underscore the impression that this is an American crew rather than any move towards diversity.

K.D Studios seem to be leaving nothing to chance: they are casting their net for the widest demographic which means the Anglosphere and having a 12+ certificate.

The problem here is that all the production team’s grey matter seems to have been expended on the – quite striking – visual impact of the film but at the expense of the plot and characterization. It is like an ornate chocolate box housing mediocre chocolate.

Popcorny.

That being said STAR MIND does retain some charms. Taken as a creature-feature it faces stiff competition from its compatriots in the form of Kola Superdeep (2020) and Sputnik (2020) and cannot even begin to compete. It does, nevertheless, feature some tense sequences: the frozen body of one of the crew slams into the window of their craft, the monster punches its way through the reinforced steel doorways and so on.

Also, while the ideas in the film may be second-hand, these ideas are interesting and do inform the events in the film.

STAR MIND may not be the epic that it promised to be. It is more of a popcorn-friendly B-movie, but is none the worse for that. There is even something endearing in its desperation to please its demographic. I am reminded more of the film Life (2017) more than anything else.

The Russian online feedback to its debut seems divided. Some claim to be duly impressed by the professionalism of its production values. They are in the minority however. There are much more couch critics who sneer at the film’s copycat nature.

Perhaps we should not worry too much. STAR MIND has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can muster up a respectable space adventure to match anything of the kind from Hollywood. Next time they just need to make sure that everyone knows that it is Russian!

The Western title will be PROJECT GEMINI [Kinopoisk.Ru]

Lead image:Datavyhoda.ru

PHANTOMS OF THE CRIMEA: REVIEW OF THE FILM `GUESTS`.

A routine paranormal drama tastefully delivered with pleasing locations and sets.

Like many less supported Russian cinema releases GUESTS was alloted a desultory run at the cinemas. I have only just caught up with it now in DVD form (which had to be ordered at that). 2019 – the year that GUESTS was put on the market already feels like a distant era. Then you could travel where you liked and mixing in groups was unproblematic (both things form the backbone of this film).

Part of a lineage.

GUESTS , a 16+ certificate 88 minute long film by Emotion Films, represents a formulaic ghost chiller of the young-people-in-an-abandoned -old-house type. The promotional poster boasts that the picture is from the same producers that brought us the chillers Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite and The Route is Built, both from 2016 .Indeed the names Georgy Malkov,Vladimir Polyskov and Danil Makhort all appear, among others, in the roll call of the producers of all these films.

Evgeny Abusov is a man you would not have predicted would have been behind the camera. Little would you know from this film that this director is better known for his comedies.

The leading role is taken by Angelina Stretchina, whose persona here is quite apart from the spunky dreadlocked tough girl she played in Queen of Spades2:Through the Looking Glass (released in the same year). The Dzhezkagan born 44 year old prolific actor Yuri Chursin brings class to the proceeding as the would -be romantic interest.

The screenplay was by Sergey Ageev who also worked on First Time (2017) a biopic concerning Alexei Leonev, the first man to space walk.

A special shout out should go to Alexandra Fatina, the photographer. She has provided the visual element to other ghost stories such as Envelope (2017) and here enriches this story with the special flavour of its location. Indeed the Black Sea coast location shots do much to impart a special character to what, on paper, seems a run-of-the-mill supernatural yarn.

Katya (Stretchina), who seems a rather timid, even frosty young woman, is working as a waitress in a cafe on the Crimean coast as the summer draws to an end. Her colleague introduces her to a new crowd. These are a gang of young hedonists whose idea of a good time is to find a property where they can lay on a private techno-rave, with one of their number being a professional DJ. Furthermore one of the men in the group takes an immediate interest in Katya.

The old dark house.

Rather against her own better judgement Katya directs their attention to an unoccupied old mansion on the coast that she knows of. (From a costume drama style prologue we know this to have been the lair of a local occultist back at the turn of the century). Soon the crew are partying in the property that they have squatted in, and trying not to think too much about the old textbooks about demonology that they have found about the place.

It is then that the long absent current owner bursts in on the scene. Andrei (Churshin) is a desperate man and he seems deranged enough for the men in the group to overtpower him and imprison him in the cellar. Then we learn that Katya had had an unconsummated tryst with this strange man when she had worked as a home-help at the mansion earlier. She begs them to release Andrei. Upon returning to the cellar, however they find that he has vanished….

Then the spirits of the house begin to make themselves known. A black ooze begins to disgorge from the walls. A phantom woman and satanic boy- child are seen. They have extendable talons and a tendency to hiss like angry cats.

Sedate.

The narrative pace is slow with many drawn out scenes. For example one long sequence just involves the youths poking around their new found prop erty. Jump scares are few and indeed even denied in scenes where you might expect one. Likewise there is no blood and guts. A young woman is impaled on a tree branch after being flung into the air by an angry spirit but we see very little. The most effective sequences are as low key as they are low tech: An unnoticed child stamds stock still in a doorway gazing in a baleful way at a room full of self-absorbed dancers.

Otherwise GUESTS constitutes a a cascade of spook paraphenalia: a seance, figures glimpsed in bathroom mirrors, people being levitated and so on. However, the real take-away from it all is the aesthetic appeal. We get stunning shots of the coast early on and then when we go indoors it’s all the muted browns and pastel green shades of an antique interior. Lovely.

Then Mark Dorbsky’s unobtruxive but brooding score reinforces the dreaminess of it all.

Here we get shown the Snapchat generation meeting their doom after kicking the hornets nest of a much older Crowleyesque set. Within that we get the usual kinds of tropes about obsessive love surviving death, the need for jusrice to be restored after so long and so on.

A shoulder shrug from compatriots.

What of the genertion this film is aimed at? Hating on their own domestic cinema is something of a Russian past-time so it comes as no surprise to find, for instance, someone calling herself `Kosmonaut Misha` on Otzovik.com, in a piece entitled `I’m sorry I saw this`:

There is an atmosphere, but it is an aymosphere of stupidity and absurdity

Yet some people appreciate these more subdued slow burners. GUESTS belongs to the same spectral category as the Spanish film The Others (2001). It might seem anodyne in comparison with the circus thrills on offer from other glitzier films but it works on its own terms. This is by no means a breakthrough film, but a stepping stone towards a cinema genre that Russia remains quite new to.

Lead image: Film.Ru

EASY TARGET: The dubious appeal of THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER.

DON’T BREATHE, the American horror thriller from five years back featured a crusty elder fighting back against youthful miscreants. The Russians get there first with VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER . Except that this is no horror movie, and the old guy is the hero!

I have hinted before that there exists a glut of gun wielding tough guy shows on Russian television. Every now and then something impressive shows up from this overcrowded market. COLD SHORES (out on Starmedia last year) – not, I admit a typical cops and robbers yarn – did boast some high production values and could have been summarised as `Russia-pulls-off Scandanavian noir`.

If you dig back a few decades,there could be some other contenders. THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER (1999) has been broadcas a few times on the TV 1000 Russian film channel of late. Despite my grave misgivings about it, it must be a tribute to its witchcraft that I had not intended to ever write about it, but find myself doing just that!

A product of the closing years of the tumultuous nineties, this film is no Bright Young Debut. The producer was Stanislav Govorukhin, a director best known for his iconic T.V seriesThe MEETING PLACE CANNOT BE CHANGED from 1979.

The leading role was filled by none other than Mikhail Ulyanov, a grand old man of stage and screen, who, among much else, was Dmitry Karamazov in the 1968 rendition of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

Furthermore, the film is an adaptation of a novel by Victor Pronin, a leading doyen of crime fiction, called WOMEN ON WEDNESDAYS published four years earlier than the film.

For all these august connections,THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER can be pigeonholed in the Michael Winner-style Vigilantes Revenge crime subgenre that causes such righteous tut-tutting – and for sound reasons.

Yet AFISHA magazine (a hard copy culture review zine from 1999 to 2015) ranked it among a 100 major Russian motion pictures.

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER details in its 95 minutes one septugenarian’s victory over some of the lawlessness of the early post-Soviet years. It is set amongst `ordinary people` in provincial Russia. (They filmed it in Kaluga, a town some 150 kilometres southwest of Moscow, now known for the Tsiolovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics).

Scenes from provincial life in THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER [Kininews.ru]

GRAMP’S REVENGE.

Ivan Afonin (Ulyanov) seems a respectable former railway worker and veteran who cares for his grand-daughter alone in a modest flat. Nearby, in the neighbourhood, live a trio of young `New Russians`. With well connected parents, these young men spend most of their time boozing and – on Wednesdays – paying for sex. They blast out rock music, drive fancy cars and one of them is a student of Structural Linguistics.

One summer’s Wednesday evening they find themselves without a female plaything and, from their balcony, catch sight of Ivan’s grandaughter in an alluring short skirt and high heels. Exuding a certain vivacious charm, one of them invites her to a `birthday party` and she goes upstairs to join them.

A gang rape ensues with all three involved. Ivan, on discovering the degradation visited on his kith and kin is devastated. He takes the usual route at first of calling the police.

The police response is rather brutal. They barge their way into the boy’s flat on a pretence of being neighbours then separate the boys and threaten them until one makes a confession.

What happens next is that the father of one of the youths shows up. He is a high-ranking policeman and, displeased as he is by his son, shuts down any further investigation.

`You’ve invaded our land` Ivan tells one functionary when he learns this. He then turns to the black market in search of a big enough gun. (`Look at what television is doing to old people these days` remarks one tradesman after turning him down). However, he finds an S.V.D rifle complete with viewfinder and an all inportant silencer – and people shady enough to be willing to sell it. When he gives it a trial run, he seems such a good shot that they compare him to someone from the Voroshilovsky regiment (A Second World War military unit with legendary marksmanship abilities).

On alternate Wednesdays he picks off the rapists one-by-one from the vantage point of a flat which the old man is looking after while the tenant is away – and which happens to be opposite the boy’s place.

The first young turk gets a bullet in the groin as he holds a bottle of champagne between his legs – and the event is assumed to be due to an exploding champagne bottle at first. He is thus castrated.

The second one is sitting in his car when it becomes an inferno owing to a shot at the petrol tank. The third one suffers a breakdown into insanity as he awaits his fate and shoots his own father – the very one who had stymied the case -in a state of paranoia.

All the while our gunman is posing as an enfeebled old duffer oblivious to the drama which he is creating. Furthermore, he attracts a Guardian Angel in the form of a sympathetic cop who stashes away the gun just before his senior colleagues come searching for it.

The vigilante rifleman is the unequivocal good-guy of this film. [recommend.ru]

Vengeance porn.

By all accounts Pronin’s novel featured a political dimension, with the shooter taking up arms on behalf of the `little people` and in opposition to the post-Yeltsin `New Russians`. This aspect is, for the most part, lost in this film. The title, as well as the promotional poster, foregrounds the old man as the Hero. His tormentors meanwhile, are rock music playing pantomime villains (if very well acted).

The violence too is a form of bloodthirsty poetic justice: for example, in the novel the first victim is shot in the leg, not the genitals.

Then there is the sexualisation of the female victim. We are treated to shots of her legs so that, before the distressing rape sequence, we feel somewhat titillated.

This is no Horror film then. Nor is it a Revenge Tragedy in the Jacobean tradition. Nor a call for us to ponder on how `violence begets violence` or somesuch issue. Ivan is set up as the clear Hero of the story and we are invited to relish in his cathartic act of disproportionate revenge.

22 year’s old and still popular to this day- but how much has this film contributed to a runaway gun culture in Russia? {prdisk.ru]

So it is no surprise that there are some who have treated this entertainment as though it were an instruction manual. For instance, In 2008, 57 year old Aleksander Mansurov was jailed for murder after he had shot two people, one of whom had allegedly raped his daughter, in a village near Rostov-On-Don. (Such tit-for-tat brutality may become more rare as gun control measures are being put in place following the school shooting that occured in Kazan back in May of this year).

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER keeps you watching throughout and then stays with you. I, for one, feel sullied by the moral vacuum at the heart of it though.

Lead image: Vkontakt.

EXHUMATION.

Dug up from the late Soviet graveyard – a still fresh werewolf yarn.

Having been AWOL for some 31 years CHAS OBOROTNYA leapt from its coffin this year. A shadowy fan group calling itself From Outer Space -Vasily and Gleb on Vkontakte – managed to source this one hour and 27-minute-long made for television curio.

Post-Soviet casualty.
A direct translation of the title would be something like Hour of change or Hour of Reversal both of which strike me as both rather good titles in themselves, yet the over-explanatory title The Hour of the Werewolf seems to have prevailed.
Tonnis TV – who were superseded four years ago by Direct -produced it and it was broadcast, once only, by All Union Cable Television in 1990. Following this there were a few hard copy DVDs of the programme around in Moscow and St Petersburg but otherwise it vanished into the ether.
That is until the above mentioned fan group hunted it down and found it quivering in the vaults of the State Film Fund. They then put it out there last April in the form of a YouTube post – with English subtitles to boot.

This film embodies something distinctive having been shot in the Soviet Ukraine in the northern Black Sea region – Odessa no less. The director’s role was taken by a 31-year-old Igor Shevchenko and the company he was working for had been only going for a year. So, we have youthfulness and an interesting locale at play here. An experienced cast helped too.

Mikhail Pakhomenko, the lead, had already been presented with an Honour of the Artist of the RSFSR three years earlier.
Alexander Baluev, playing Grigory’s son, would eight years later have a role in the Hollywood film Deep Impact as a cosmonaut. Marina Starykh, the would-be love interest, is a very busy small screen actress never off Russian television screens.
Man on the brink.
The events occur in a provincial Russian town during one of those sweltering summers that this country specializes in. Grigory Maksimovich works a s a reporter for a local newspaper and, in late middle-age has become a widower.
The newspaper’s one-time editor has absconded leaving his post open. All to aware of his advancing years, Grigory has set his sights on becoming the new chief editor. However, a younger colleague functions as his rival in this ambition.
Meanwhile Grigory keeps a keen eye on a typesetting colleague called Taya, a friendly and desirable woman. Another co-worker, a party chairman presents himself as something of a confidante for Grigory before being unmasked as a man indulging in office politics. (In 1990 such a negative portrayal of a party cadre could well have seemed quite significant).
Otherwise superstition still hangs on in this backwater (The full Moon is a good time to make pickles Taya tells Grigory only half in jest). Howling is heard in the night and a werewolf on the loose gets whispered about. A Dog’s Gate – a sort of wooden structure formed from three intertwined boughs forms part of the local architecture. Grigory, good Soviet man that he is, will have none of it.
How ignorant people are, he tells the party chairman. They read about perestroika in the morning and gossip about evil spirits in the evening.

A rare DVD of `The Hour of the Werewolf`
[auction.ru]

It is shortly after this remark, however, that the journalist is set upon a mysterious black dog just as he is boarding the last tram home. It has taken a chunk out of the man’s ankle….

Metamorphosis.
During the long, balmy nights Grigory undergoes slow and painful transformations. This rational and cultured Soviet citizen will transition into a fanged, four-legged marauder. Furthermore, like Mr. Hyde, in this form he will hunt down his daytime bugbears. (I had to double check that this film came out four years before the Jack Nicholson vehicle and parable of middle-aged revenge – Wolf) His young rival for the office of Editor falls from a stairwell window fleeing the hound, Taya’s other lover and Taya herself are set upon in bed and the party Chairman is duly mauled.

Now a tortured Raskolnikov figure, Grigory attempts to tie himself to his bed at night and hopes that his terrible dreams are but premonitions.
It will be his own son , ahard-nosed young policeman (Alexander Baluev) ,who will unbeknownst to himself, execute his own father – and not with any silver bullets.

Marina Starykh getting an unwelcome visitor. [Kino Poisk]

Twist.
The Dog’s Gate lore was new to me but, otherwise The Hour of the Werewolf pays obeisance to the expected lycanthropy tropes. Under the full moon the transformation scenes are economic but effective, when combined: distorting camera lenses, an impressive array of vampiric fangs, a wolfman mask and a black dog.
The summer setting sets the ambience apart from the usual wintriness of such tales (even if a bit of fake mist is added to some scenes).
The portentous synthesizer mood music courtesy of Artemy Artemiev, – sometimes Bach type organ chords and Giorgio Moroder style rhythmic pulsing -dates the production as much as the electric typewriters do.

Zeitgeist.
There are no heroes in this kitchen sink supernatural thriller, except Grigory seems like a decent man engulfed by his Id. In this though he is not alone in this (the film seems to suggest)as the Soviet Union embarks on perestroika.
A tramp is shown being hurled onto the ground after attempting to join in a street party. A subplot involves sordid money-grubbing as Grigory’s son ties to reclaim some cash that his late mother had lent to a miscreant.
There is a comic interlude involving a satirised hustler in the form of a young would-be poet on a desperate look out for employment with the newspaper. (When asked what workshop he comes from he replies: Frankly a poetical one…actually I’m an operator at the water tower.)
The action climaxes in a scene of social disintegration as residents wait in the night at a furniture warehouse for their names to be called so that they may collect ordered house household items.
The Hour of the Werewolf packs oodles of charm with its nostalgic ambience and relatable protagonist. Of course, to judge the show’s production values with fairness you would have to set it against other Western made for television movies produced that same period.. When you do so, it does not come out looking so bad.

Main image: horrorzone.

`SHERLOCK IN RUSSIA`: HOLMES FINDS HIS HEART IN SAINT PETERSBURG.

IN THIS AMBITIOUS BUT PREDICTABLE DARK FANTASY SERIES THE WORLD’S BEST KNOWN SLEUTH IS ON THE TRAIL OF THE RIPPER IN RUSSIA’S CULTURAL CAPITAL. BUT, WAIT…ARE THOSE TEARS?

Embrace the chaos, Mr Holmes!

One thing that enlivened a dull pandemic was the fact that some people were doling out free face masks in some metro stations in Moscow. These promotionals were swish black items featuring the legend Sherlock v Rossi – Sherlock in Russia.

Sherlock in Russia AKA Sherlock: the Russian Chronicles represents the latest uncalled for addition to the overstretched Sherlock Holmes smorgasbord. This 18+ period-mystery-action show reached Russia on October 6th this year as part of the Moscow International Film Festival. Then it would infect a wider audience through being offered as a weekly subscription by START Video Service. The series was shown every Thursday in 52 minute long episodes until December 3rd.

Millenial iconoclasm.
It has been open season on the august occupant of 221b Baker Street since the turn of the millenium if not before. The Soviet Union, despite seeming to be steadfast in opposition to Western imperialism and so on, did at least distinguish itself with its fidelity to the Arthur Conan-Doyle scripture. The television series filmed by Lenfilm and running from 1979 to 1986 called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is viewed by many afiocandos of the cult fiction to be among the Gold Standards.

The post-communist Russian Federation, however, has come out fighting with its own sacriligeous pop culture variants on the Sherlock mythos to match those of Britian and America.

Thus seven years back one Igor Petrenko embodied Sherlock Holmes in a television drama called just that (produced by Rossiya1 and Central Partnership). He seemed more like a poet than a detective the reviewer Kim Newman said of his portrayal (Wikipedia).

This fare, however, still held onto the apron strings of the traditional canon; Sherlock Holmes in Russia all but dispenses with it. In that regard, the clearest precedent for this would seem to be Guy Ritchie’s 2009 shameless make-over of the cerebral icon as the sort of youthful, dapper action hero that could be played by Robert Downey Junior (Sherlock Holmes, Warner Bros, 2009).

Illustrious names.
A 55 year old conceptual artist from Sverdlosk comprises one of the culprits for this show. A member of the infamous Blue Noses Art Group no less, Alexander Shaburov also penned a series entitled The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes between 1991 and 1992.
Then the prolific fifty year-old screen writer Oleg Malovichko – who worked on this year’s breakthrough film Sputnik among many other prominent releases – transmuted these sketches into something watcheable.

Then a bankable star to don the dear-stalker and hold the pipe was the only other thing that was needed. Step forward the 38 year-old Svetly born Maxim Matvyeev – who appeared in Stilyagi in 2008 and played Vronsky in a TV adaptation of Anna Karenina three years ago .

Artifice.
Despite being filmed on location in Saint Petersburg, the scenes exude an overall contrived appearance with a crepescular ochre-burnt orange shade to everything. The iconography reminded me of the look of Viktor Frankenstein, the British film from 2015.

Matvyeev’s Holmes could not be further from the classic late middle-aged sexually ambigous representation of him. This actor is a screen idol type in the Danila Kozlovsky mould. He plays him with a trimmed beard and a floppy fringe and demonstrating cuddly emotions. He even blows on his magnifying glass as though it were a smoking gun.

Other nods to our brave new world include jerky camera shots and, at one early point, a cretinous glitch in the matrix in the form of a snatch of music from Britney Spears’s Toxic ! (We can be grateful that the otherwise more appropriate sepulchural soundtrack is by Ryan Otter for most of the proceedings).

On the hunt for a legend.
The breakneck paced action opens in rain-soaked back alleys of East London. Somebody (who at least has the decency to wear a mask) is trawling the alleways with knife crime on his mind. He is closing in on a quarry, when:
Hello, Mr Ripper, allow me to introduce myself.... comes the opening line of You Know Who. Telegenic fisticuffs then ensue. Watson comes to the rescue but this results in him being put into a coma.
Distraught at his companion’s fate, Holmes nevertheless takes a steam train bound for Russia. He has deduced that the serial killer is from that land on account of the make of knife that he uses. Furthermore, the killer has been leaving taunting messages for Holmes written in blood on street walls.

New friends and enemies.
Holmes arrives in Saint Petersburg and takes up lodgings in Pekarskaya Street (this is a pun on Baker street – a pekarniya being a bakery in Russian). He mails missives back to London to update those at home and his letters are read out to the unconscious Watson as a kind of therapy (this narrative device is borrowed in part from The Hound of the Baskervilles).
His host consists of a hired medical assistant in the form of the hardboiled Doctor Kartsev (the 52 year old Muscovite Vladimir Mishukov) with whom he faces a rocky partnership.

The trope of Interference From Those in Authority is fulfilled by the Chief of Police Znamensky. This buffonish character regards Dostoevsky (who Holmes is well versed in) as over-rated and considers the work of the Ripper to be the handiwork of an ecaped gorilla. He regards the migrants deductive approach – presented here as a sort of savant’s mental tick over which Holmes has no control – as a lot of new fangled nonsense.
It is whilst on a fact-finding tour of the Saint Petersburg slums – bring a knife and a prayer Kartsev advises him -that he encounters the plot’s crucial love interest: Sophie, played by the inevitable Irina Starshenbaum.

Irina Starshenbaum provides the love interest [mirf.ru]

Russian self-reflection.

In a manner rare for a Russian product Sherlock in Russia does try to say something about Russian identity in relation to the rest of the world. It is the illiberal and very much autocratic Russia of Alexander the Third’s reign that Holmes steps into.( Some might draw paralells with today’s Russia).
As soon as Holmes emerges from the station at Saint Petersburg he treads on a cow pat. Later we learn that Kartsev harbours a particular suspicion of the British. His memory of his uncle being shot by by a British sniper in the Crimean war has seen to that.

Holmes, who has an improbable level of Russian fluency, has to learn some Russian idiomatic phrases. I'll smash myself into a pancake, for example is a promise to work very hard.
Znamensky, meanwhile does seem to embody a certain type of Russian provincial ignorance. He has to be told not to let his colleagues wash away the evidence from the scene of a crime, for example.

So…this Russia is a bit rustic, holds old grudges,is full of quaint phrases and inept in its handling of investigative policing. Later in the series Holmes will even utter the words: I don't understand Russia. It's terrible.

Holmes in love.
Matvyeev’s Holmes outstrips Downey Junior’s in being teary-eyed, soulful and in opening up to the ladies. This Holmes has a full on hetersosexual relationship, which may well be a first. He also suffers visionary flashbacks in the manner of the re-imagined Nikolai Gogol in the cinema-cum TV series Gogol, which may have been the model for this series.

That said, there is one traditional aspect of this drama and it is something which has lent a rare 18+ certificate and prevents it from going out on mainstream terrestrial Russian television. This is the dwelling on the gentleman sleuth’s addiction to cocaine. I doubt this fact will placate the international Sherlock Holmes community though.

Judging from the First Episode this series may be cheesy, but it is not bereft of intelligence. For me the most menmorable character was Doctor Kartsev. He was more Holmes than Holmes was in many ways.

The lead image: deneri.net.

SHERLOCK IN RUSSIA – First Episode with English subtitles:

THE ABRAMENKO EXPERIMENT: THE FILM `SPUTNIK`.

Egor Abramenko’s intense cosmic threat thriller SPUTNIK is so much more than a Russian Alien.

With mounting alarm the young psychologist observes the scene unfolding on the CCTV. The cosmonaut is thrown to the floor in a convulsive motion. From his mouth oozes a ridge of slime. Two spindly limbs emerge from this and the being begins to creep forward. The military man, also watching, has seen this all before….

Sputnik means satellite in Russian but also carries connotations of fellow traveller. The film with this title, a thriller with a science-fiction premise and scary movie trappings, is a rare beast in Russia. Such a mix of genres is matched only by The Fatal Eggs, an adaptation of the Bulgakov novel from 1995 and Diggers (2016) and Avanpost from last year.

Intended for release last April, the film ended up getting its premier on the net, owing to the pandemic. There it gathered over one million viewers in Russia alone. I, however, waited for the cinema doors to be flung open again, and my patience was rewarded. SPUTNIK is one picture that deserves to be experienced in a large and loud format.

Egor Abramenko, the man on the high stool, has been churning out commercials for years but his other brainchild was an eleven minute long short called Passenger released three years ago. This was to be the egg that was to hatch SPUTNIK.

Some bankable celebrities signed up for the project. That Golden Boy of the Russian media Fyodor Bondarchuk has come from behind the cameras to fill one of the main roles. So has the stately 33 year-old St Petersburgian Oksana Akinshina, who had a cameo role in Rassvet, this time being given prime space.

Interrupted mission.
Andropov is in the Kremlin – it is 1983 – and around the earth circle two cosmonauts on a routine orbital mission. They are about to re-enter the atmosphere when it happens. There is an unholy knock on the spacecraft’s hull….Only one of the crew members makes it back to terra firma alive – and he has black eyes….

Later a female psychologist – Tatyana Klimova – with a history of employing maverick methods, (Akinshina) is getting a dressing down at a tribunal in Moscow. As she leaves in disgrace she is approached by a military colonel called Semiparov (Fyodor Bondarchuk). He considers her to be of made of the right stuff for a position he has to offer her. This involves reaearch into a unique incident.

He chaperones her on a journey to the Caucuses. There, in a military installation, she learns that a cosmonuat who is supposed to have died on return is alive but infected with a parasite of unearthly origin, and no memory of how it got there. (Pyotr Fyodorov who also appeared in Avanpost).

Soon Tatyana begins to harbour qualms about the humanitarian implications of how this hero of the Soviet Union is being treated – as well as the uses to which the resulting knowledge will be put. Can she escape the compound and return to Moscow to expose the dark doings of this rogue operation?

Space age possession.
This 1 hour and 53 minute drama has a measured pace and highlights the human dilemmas that the situation throws up (challenging the view that science fiction and horror lacks human depth). There is even a sort of sub-plot concerning the neglected child of the cosmonaut, languishing away in a care home in Rostov-on-the-Don.

The two story writers Andrey Zolotarev and Oleg Malovichko had also both worked on Attraction (2017) and Invasion (2020) which were alien contact tales directed by Bondarchuk. Those blockbusters, however, were frothy fun-for-all-the-family affairs whereas SPTUTNIK contains more intelligence in its details.

With SPUTNIK being something of a star vehicle for her, Akinshina makes for a likeable lead. She is no Sigourney Weaver-like action hero but a woman constrained by her professional role while thrown into an extraordinary situation.

Bondarchuk, meanwhile, does what he does best: lend gravitas to the proceedings. He portrays a complex man with some paternal affection for Tatyana and a begrudging dependence on the creature who he wishes to isolate and exploit.

The assistant-to-the-heroine is a stiff white-coated drudge of a research scientist (played with conviction by Anton Vasilev) whose conscience is awakened by Tatyana. It is he who phones through to the Moscow authorities with some important information before being gunned down.

The creature itself is a fine piece of work, if not original.Stitched up by Main Road Post, its a puppet and CGI slimy quadruped with several eyes, insectoid limbs, buzz saw teeth and cute floppy ears. Living off the hormones produced by fear, it has a penchant for cracking open heads and slurping on the contents.

Last, but no means least is the score by Oleg Karpachev. With its bombastic drum-heavy sound, this really signs and seals the sense of a shadowy secret mission.

Well received.
The primary mood is one of mounting unease. It is refreshing to see that the director has not relied on sudden noises and appearances to stun us, but instead there are some drawn out nightmarish sequences, such as when the alien is being fed live prisoners. There is some gross out involved as well as some tomato ketchup flying about (both untypical for a Russian film) but this is restrained.

The 1983 period placement is a puzzle. Is a hidden event in history being shown to us – as in Apollo 18 ? Or is it a way round the problem of how to portray the military as fragmented and corrupted without incurring the wrath of the censors? Or is this just an exercise in nostalgia? (An iconic Russian toy does play a part in the proceedings).

Reaching America and the UK, SPUTNIK has set forth an excited rattle of keyboards and much of what is being said is positive. The default comparison most seem to be making is with the Alien franchise.

True SPUTNIK has a ballsy heroine, but this is less rare in Russian cinema, and otherwise it is earth bound, set in the past, and much less of a stalk-and-slash romp. A more telling comparison is with the British television series from 1953 – The Quatermass Experiment. The initial premise is almost identical except that SPUTNIK then takes off on a different tangent.

Russian language promo for the British series `The Quatermass Experment` Was this the real inspiration behind the film? [sweet.tv]

For me, the film leans too much on hackneyed tropes about a caring, maternal woman in opposition to a monomanic, ruthless male. Otherwise, the borrowing fom Nigel Kneale aside, it is quite fresh and there is something primal and archetypal in the idea of a man having a goblin in his stomach which comes out by night. As Tatiana asks: Parasite or symbiote?.

Many Russian horror movies seem targetted at a young South East Asian audience and tend to play down their national origins. Not so SPUTNIK, which -with its setting in the steppes, glimpse of Soviet times and concern with military machinations – is Russian through and through.

Lead image: in-rating.ru

The trailer (English subtitles):

THE WICKED WITCH ISN’T DEAD: The film BABA YAGA: TERROR OF THE DARK FOREST.

An age old folk demon is after the kids of a prosperous housing development in Podgaevsky’s latest dark fantasy. My kids are safe. Are YOURS?

How we longed, this year, for that promised big freeze with its white cityscape. But winter never came.

Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest/Baba Yaga: Koshmar Temnova Lesa felt a bit the same. The internet hype first informed me that it would get its release on October 31st of last year. This then was moved forward to the following January. In the event it was in the theatres on 27th February, a deadzone for new films. (The only opposition came from Kalashnikov – a disgraceful biopic of a man who designed mechanisms to kill people with. Jesus wept!)

The irony was that on the day that I saw it, a mini-snow blizzard appeared in the city, as though winter too had made a desperate late showing!
The wait was worth it if only to see how this fifth supernatural tale from the emerging new voice in Russian film craft, the 37-year-old Muscovite Svyatoslav Podgaevsky would shape up.

Not only did he co-direct it (with Natalia Hencker) and co-write the film (alongside Natalya Dubovaya and Ivan Kapitonov) but he co-produced it for Non-Stop films.

As with The Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite (2016) and The Bride (2017) and, in particular, last year’s Rusalka: Lake of the Dead this project offers an idiosyncratic kind of muscular folk horror using East European folk tales as a backdrop.

The superb promotional poster for this film did much to cement its reputation long before it hit the screens. [Yello.com]

The cast includes the 37-year-old beauty from Severodvinsk, Svetlana Ustinova, who plays the nanny. Lending the film some needed gravitas Igor Khripunov also partakes. His craggy looks have graced four of Podgaevsky’s previous films, making him a sort of Russian Ralph Bates.

New Moscow.
The location constitutes one of the brand new sleeper dorms that are springing up outside Moscow to cater for wealthy young families( with the metro being expanded in order to accommodate them). Far from exuding the spooky ambience of your traditional horror setting, this locale feels aspirational and septic.

Nevertheless, it functions as an outpost. When the new buildings thin out we run into a dense and expansive area of forest. As the action unfolds the New Town and the Encircling Forest start to feel like players in the story.

Boy-saviour.
Egor, a fourteen year old boy (Oleg Chuginov) forms the film’s protagonist (making a change from the young women common to this genre). His life involves walking to his nearby school, dealing with hoodlums, making approaches to his sweetheart (Glafira Golubeva). and helping to care for his newborn kid sister.

His mother, played by Maryana Spivak (Loveless, 2017) and father, Denis Shvedov (The Mayor, 2013) seem distracted by career demands and hire a nanny to attend to their offspring….

So far we have a slice-of-Russian-middle-class-life. Then Egor starts to notice a presence menacing the baby….
Noticing a shadowy form on the baby’s video monitor, the boy creeps into the room only to be confronted with a menacing female apparition from which he flees….

He will later go deep into the dark forest with his sweetheart and former bully (Artyom Zhigulin) and team up with a hut dwelling hobo called Mrachnny (Khripunov) who has been watching children disappear from the locality and confirms this to be the work of Baba Yaga. The story then becomes a mission to save the baby, and thereby the family.

A Yaga for our times.
Yaga, a long-nosed wicked witch from Slavic folklore often gets depicted as living in a hut held aloft by chicken legs. She flies around on a mortar and displays a penchant for young children. She can, however, play a helpful role when so inclined.

Not so in this film’s updated version! A shape shifter, she she is a femme-fatale as a nanny but later manifests as a sort of peg-legged female Phantom of the Opera. Later on again she appears as an animated mass of red knitting wool.

The tense and humourless action is enlivened with some hallucinatory episodes and we enter a parallel time stream where the baby has become airbrushed out of existence and the now satanic parents are without memory of her. The plot, having begun as a ghost story accelerates into a rollicking dark fantasy romp.

Genre trappings.
For all the originality of the setting, the film falls back on many witchy hokum standbys. There are the kids against the corrupted elders. A bad nanny. Demonic possessions (complete with people’s eyes rolling up to the whites), baby dolls aplenty and people getting hurled about by occult powers.
The shock jumps are lined up like billiard balls and beging to pall after a while.
A portentous and numinous score by Nick Skachkov (On the Edge, 2019) helps to bind it all together.

Breaking new ground.
It feels a bold move to have used as the monster figure as well known to Russians as Jack and the Beanstalk is to Western Europeans. This was all of apiece with Podgaevsky’s earlier films. The last one reinvigorated Rusalka in the same fashion (a water nymph that gets mistranslated into mermaid in English).
Whether this will beget lasting screen idols to equal the vampires and werewolves of the last century remains to be seen. This represents a quiet innovation, however.

Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest sets the suburban modernity of the Russia of now on a collision course with a Slavic demon from very old Russia which lives in a forest next door.

There is plenty for a Jungian style psychoanalyst to chew over here. All of Podgaevsky’s recent movies have introduced us to wrathful female demons, for example. Then what is the significance of the red ball of wool that makes its appearance throughout this film?

Circus.
As with The Bride and Rusalka: Lake of the Dead I felt dazzled by the first hour of the film as the situation was being set up. Then when it all turned into a romp I became ever more detached and restless. Some of the supernatural elements stretched my credulity so much that I felt that anything could happen and the scariness of it got a bit lost.

Likewise, as much as young Egor makes for a valiant hero, he and his tweeny chums gave me the impression that I was sitting through something that might have been better aimed at a much younger demographic. (It is interesting to note that Podgaevsky cut his directorial teeth on a long established comedy T.V show called Jumble which features young kids and their daft ways).

That said this constitutes Podgaevsky’s least derivative and most assured work to date. The film is due to reach audiences in the Baltic States, South East Asia, Latin America and The USA.The director, who is working on a new film (Privorot/Dark Spell), is bound to become recognised on the international stage soon.

The featured image is from K.G Portal.

The trailer (dubbed into English):

BOYFRIENDS COME IN BOXES: The film (NOT) IDEAL MAN.

Does this satire on modern man-woman relations dig deep enough?

I was once acquainted with a professional Russian model who asked me one day if I could be her friend (and she did just mean friend). I doubt I need to explain why I was quick to talk my way out of that one…

This must be a common experience for desirable women in Russia, as well as elsewhere. Such female loneliness forms the starting point of the sex comedy-cum-romantic comedy (Not) Perfect Man (Nye Idealni Mushina). But what does it have to say about Russian men?

From a light entertainment troupe.
If you want the truth, I had gone to the cinema with the aim of seeing the science fiction epic Koma , which would have been much closer to my comfort zone. However, in the event I felt drawn to something altogether lighter. This was the evening of January 31st, and I am a British citizen. I just wanted to wrap my frenzied brain in candy floss and to forget the unfolding events at home.
A wrong call….

(Not ) Perfect Man constitutes a 12+certificate 90 minute long comedy - romance directed by Marius Balchunas. In the blurb for the film, this 48 year old wunderkind is described as the enfant terrible of cinema. This makes him sound like some sort of Pedro Almodovar like figure but in fact Balchunas, who studied TV Cinema in Southern California, is the culprit behind such vacuous fare as Naughty Grandmother (2017) and Naughty Grandmother 2 (2019).

The film’s protagonist is provided by the 37 year old Muscovite and stalwart of such comedies, Yulia Aleksandrova and the 25-year-old R&B crooner Egor Creed forms the love interest – by, more or less, playing himself.

Other major players include Artyem Suchkov (Gogol: The Terrible Revenge, 2018) and Roman Kurstyn (Pain Threshold, 2019).
No doubt it is pure coincidence that Zhora Kryzhovnikov – who along with Evgenia Khripkova worked on the script and was behind a TV series called Call Di Caprio last year – is the spouse of the leading lady.

Living ornaments.
Robots seem a hot topic in Russia right now. Andrey Junkovsky’s dystopian science fiction series Better Than Us (Lushi Chem Lyudi, 2018), which features a future containing human-like androids, has made waves on Netflix of late and the mini-series Tolya Robot, written by Aleksey Nuzhny for T.N.T, concerns a disabled man whose life is changed by bionic technology.

Likewise, if you just look at the premise of (Not) Perfect Man one could imagine it to have been adapted from one of Isaac Asimov’s more serio-comic robot short stories. In this near-future scenario human-like androids are on sale to the public and each one operates within the parameters of a given persona.These programmed personas might comprise an ideal Chef, an ideal Secretary, Security Guard…or Friend.

Sveta (Aleksandrova) is employed by a company which deals in these very items. Her job is to activate them and see to it that they are placed on display for shoppers. We learn, meanwhile, that she has caught her bodybuilding jock of a boyfriend (Kurtsyn) cheating on her. She is ready for a new romance….

Among the androids is a handsome and sensitive Friend (Creed) who soon gets snapped up by a middle-aged socialite. Later she returns him, however, in a state of exasperated fury. Tests show that there exists a fault in the robot’s programming and the company is ready to dispose of him. This is when Sveta, beguiled by his charm, comes to the rescue and takes him home with her as his new owner.

At first the robotic Friend seems like a Russian take on the fabled New Man of the 1980s in the West: kind, intimate and domesticated.

Complications ensue, however when this programmed people-pleaser becomes the best buddy of her ex-boyfriend. Then he obliges with some – not so 12 certicate friendly – physical solace to a distraught girfriend of Sveta’s. This results in a skirmish in which his face becomes broken.

With assistance from a nerdish colleague (Suchkov) – who has been falling for her all the while – she fixes his face and the fault in his programming. Or does she?

Sveta and her roboman soon become a poster couple for female -to-machine couplings. They arrange a lavish wedding on Krymsky Most. However, during the wedding vows the bride flirts with the woman who is leading the ceremony….

Salted popcorn.
Those who had entered the cinema to catch a science fiction movie would have left without stars in their eyes: the tomorrow’s world in which the story takes place is lacking in background exposition. The only concession to any technical detail occurs when we see Sveta animating the robots. Otherwise this could all be taking place in the Moscow of today.

(Not ) Perfect Man feels like your standard gossip-over-the-fence chick flick replete with emotive facial close ups, a quasiclassical score and a location which flits between a disinfected office, a swish nightclub and an imaculate apartment interior.

Nevertheless, the ending stears clear of the usual hugging-and-learning. In fact, it is cynical enough to suggest that some women will opt for illusory affection even when they know it to be so. Thus there was some unpredicted sadness at the core of the film.

One Dimensional Men.
The young couple sat next to me in the underpopulated cinema chuckled in the right places, but I did wonder if they would still have laughed if the genders had been reversed in the story.

I mean, the real – that is non-mechanical – men in this film offer a parade of messed up dullards and daffy meatheads. Even the alternative love interest, in the form of the colleague who really does care for our heroine, is a botannik (a wonk) and not so glamorous. They all get upstaged by a robot – a robot whose most woman-friendly qualities arise from a malfunction!

It seems that Russian men- growing up in a culture that smothers them with excess mother-love then packs them off to the army, where they may well be bullied by homophobes (even if straight) – are not encouraged to express themselves in a way which their female counterparts would appreciate.

Prove You’re Not a Robot.
Man/woman stuff aside, this film does have one simple premise working behind it (and that is something which both comedy and science fiction needs). It is that people are being commodified and subsumed into their work roles. The robots in this film all have pre- programmed work and social functions and can be distingiushed by the bar codes on their necks.

Had this film been slanted a bit more to the science-fiction end of things it could have been freer to explore the implications of this idea. It might well have even have been funnier in doing so. As it is, we are left with just as much a people-pleaser as Creed’s robot was and the film never rises above its own trivial level.

The trailer:

Main image: Yandex.com

THE DAY MOSCOW STOOD STILL: the film VTORZHENIYE (INVASION).

Can a Putinist popcorn merchant produce another film with something to say? The launch of INVASION – the long-awaited sequel to the science-fiction classic ATTRACTION – gave us a chance to find out.

I could smell the aftermath of fireworks as I hurried to the Yuzhny cinema in the unseasonal sleet and sludge. I was en route to a different type of pyrotechnic show. Like a dutiful Russian citizen, I was ready to see the very definition of a national blockbuster – VTORZHENIYE – INVASION.

This 12+ certificate extravaganza – a follow-up to ATTRACTION ( 2017) – had been promoted in every way possible. The TVs on in the metro carriages reminded us of it. Every cinema in town had an installation dedicated to it in the lobby. Hell, even the safety instructions at the beginning of this film were led by the actors from it!

For once, therefore, I could pick which cinema to go to. Also.this being the holiday season, I could choose when to go. I went to a showing in the Chertanovo region of Moscow, which is where ATTRACTION had been set and filmed. I chose three days after its December 31st opening as a way to mark the New Year.

Bondarchuk’s shadow.
The fifty-two-year old Muscovite Fyodor Bondarchuk heads Art Picture Studios as the director of INVASION. Something of an establishment lynchpin, this man is known for his grandstanding for the President of Russia and for the ruling United Russia party.

In terms of style, he seems something of a cinematic Christopher Marlowe who aims for the big, the brash and the loud. In accordance with this he has been responsible for such evocations of patriotic heroism as Stalingrad (2013).
Bondarchuk, however, does have form with the rather more cerebral science fiction genre. Before ATTRACTION he surprised critics with a faithful rendition of an Arkady & Boris Strugatsky novel in the form of The Dark Planet (2008).

So whilst Bondarchuk’s name is not one that would draw me to see a film, my interest was piqued by the fact that I had enjoyed ATTRACTION. In that film, the aliens were obvious representations of immigrants and the Other. `Let’s try to hear each other` was Bondarchuk’s summary of his message at the time (quoted in Flickering Myth, January 22nd, 2018). I was intrigued by this apparent cryptoliberalism and concerned to see whether it would continue in what is also known as ATTRACTION 2.

Dejavu.
The cast list from ATTRACTION are back in service. Irina Starshenbaum – who I last saw as a rock and roll widow in Summer – plays Yulia Lebedev once more and the 59-year-old Laurence Olivier Theatre Award winner Oleg Menshikov is still her father and her geek buddy, Google, remains as Evgeni Miksheev.

Alexander Petrov – proving yet again that he’s a big enough actor (and man) to depict rather pathetic characters – returns as Yulia’s would be lover.

The thirty year old Rinal Mukhamentov (The Three Musketeers, 2013) – a sort of Tatar Justin Timberlake – reprises his role as Hakon, the alien.
The other stars – the fun gizmos – also make a welcome return. The now iconic gyroscope like mothership has been replaced and is circling our planet again. The Transformer-like exoskeletal body combat suit also re-appears as does all that aquatic witchcraft which has water coiling in spirals in the air.

Filmed in IMAX by Vladislav Opelyants (Hostages, 2017) and with a score by the much in demand Igor Vdovin (Another Woman, 2019) INVASION attempts to satisfy every cinema going demographic. Half family drama and romance and half military adventure, the scenes lurch between smoochy bits, tense action and disaster movie grandeur and then back again.

Sorcery from the sky.
We find ourselves in the present day, but it is one in which the events of ATTRACTION have taken place. (The back story is suggested in the opening credits by the use of frozen lazer-like stills from key scenes of the earlier film).

Yulia now studies astrophysics in Moscow alongside her loyal mate Google. She is, however, no ordinary woman. Always flanked by bodyguards, she is under investigation by a new military unit concerned with all things E.T, led by her father. She spends her evenings in a flotation tank, being tested for psi-powers.

Russia, meanwhile, is busy aspiring to reverse engineer the technology that the aliens had left in their wake. Meanwhile they have surrounded our planet with defense satellites to prevent further incursions into our atmosphere.

The military unit re-introduces Yulia to Artyom, who is now incapacitated by a stroke. This is a deliberate ploy. The disturbance this creates in Yulia’s mind results in a telekinetic storm.

Later, as she knocks back a few medicinal cocktails in a downtown bar and tries to flirt with her minder, Hakon makes a sudden re-appearance….

The handsome star man is now earthbound and ensconced in a pleasant dacha outside Moscow. However, he continues to be in contact with a mothership’s on board computer. He has gained the information that an alien Artificial Intelligence called Ra has taken an interest in Yulia’s awakened psychic powers.
The couple elope with the military in hot pursuit. The rest of the action consists of a three-way tussle between Hakon and Yulia, the military and the mysterious Ra.

Ra has the ability to control the world’s electronic media and puts out the fake news that Yulia is a terrorist. Later, in a rather Biblical episode, it summons up the waters around and below Moscow to envelop the city in a sort of vertical whirlpool….

…Or something. If this plot sounds freakish and preposterous that is because it is nothing more than a Christmas tree upon which various spectacular action scenes – military helicopters spiralling out of control, geysers destroying Park Kulturi metro station and so on – are hung.

Yulia’s story.
There is much tension between the intimate and the global in all of this. At its core, INVASION concerns the emotional journey of Yulia and her fixing it with her father, making peace with Artyom and deepening her relationship with Hakon. Starshenbaum has enough magnetism to make this focus work.

Otherwise the film is lacking in a central idea of the kind that made ATTRACTION so interesting. Sure, the subplot about fake news in the electronic mass media is very topical, but it is not at the heart of the story.

Whilst a composite of many motion pictures that have gone before it, INVASION is quite distinctive in its overall effect. The recent Avanpost however, covered the same sort of territory with bleaker conviction.

Still, as I shook my head through this two hour and thirteen minute farrago, I thought: what a roaring way to welcome in the Roaring Twenties!

Main image: capelight.de

Trailer to INVASION (English subtitles).